She was asking if a profile on the internet was me, since you asked. We were friends, you see. It had been some time since we had seen each other. I knew she was engaged, perhaps even married. I told her I was going to be town meeting with several people and asked if she'd join us for dinner. My head was spinning, but I forced the feelings down where I kept my concerns about the ever more out of control real estate developments.
New Orleans was surreal in the extreme. To understand it you have to understand that many people were dead. My ex lover and her team were rescuing animals who were abandoned in the evacuation of the city. Everyone that had left did so with the expectation that they would come back, but with no local services, there was nothing to come back to.
I met the ex lover in my hotel room. She took a shower, there were no real showers in the temporary camp where they were headquartered. You might think that I tried something, and I certainly thought about it. We grasped each other when she came in, and exchanged a kiss which could have been a preamble or the recognition of a deeply satisfying and satisfied past sexual relationship. It was both chaste and deeply sensual. Then it was into the shower for her to change while I sat at my desk and thought about the girl, the sound of the shower in the background. You may well guess what was going through my mind, but no matter what your guess is, you would be right.
Outside, she in a clean black dress that was none too conservative or chaste it was growing dark. Bourbon street was lit up like the week before the storm. The rest of the city, however, the entire rest of the city was pitch black. It was the dead city of the apocalypse. Ten years later, parts of the surrounding community would still be empty as a result of the massive collapse of infrastructure and the flooding that accompanied the storm.
The pet rescue people were a bizarre assortment of people who passionately loved animals and had the resources to pick up and move at the spur of the moment. They were poor and rich, hippy and socialite. The stories they told were moving in the extreme. In many cases, it being summer, the area being flooded and there being no power, they would break into homes sealed for weeks to clouds of deadly black mold; often to find a starving, dehydrated dog standing defensively over the body of their drowned master. And they were a handsome group, the women beautiful, the men tall and handsome if a little worn from the primitive conditions they'd adopted out of necessity.
I forgot them completely when she walked into the restaurant. I tried to stay focused on my friend who I'd come with, but I couldn't focus on anything else. You have to understand, in addition to her beauty, which needed nothing added, she was the most intelligent, vibrant person in any room. Everyone had stories of their work after the storm, living in the chaos of a series of crises each one having a higher priority than the next, the shifting nature of things confusing the order minute by minute. This was when President Bush, overcoming his initial bafflement, was over-reacting in the opposite direction and there were humvees and men in uniform randomly appearing and disappearing and both rescue and combat helicopters sharing airspace trying to decide if they were in a war zone or a rescue mission.
Bourbon street was Bourbon street, somehow, and I ensured that the drinks and wine flowed for there seemed no end of money for me at that time, the darkness that was coming was still on the horizon, like the black curve of storm when you see an organized hurricane looming in the distance.
I caught the girl alone for a moment and asked if I could see her again. She suggested I could come by after dinner. There was nothing sexual, I did not even have time to find out if it was to meet this fiance or husband or just to talk.
After dinner we, the ex and I, went back to my hotel room ostensibly to pick up her things which she'd brought in contemplation of using my shower. She, an exotic beauty, seemed baffled by my failure to give her an opportunity to fight off, or not, my advances, but as soon as practical with as much decorum as I could muster, I sent her on her way, clothes in hand in disorganized bundles. In this situation of madness that was post hurricane New Orleans, no one would have noticed.
I sat back on the bed after she was gone and looked at a complete stranger in the mirror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC8QcaMMVQE
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